A Late-Night Phone Call: Light, Life, and Mind Converge

Let there be light!

Photo of an open book illuminated by a string of lights showing the words “health & wellbeing” by Eliott Mason at Unsplash.

With the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine just last week awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel for their groundbreaking work in optogenetics, understanding a little neuroscience helps us understand the merit of this scientific breakthrough. Working for over 20 years, these scientists have been seeing the effects of highly targeted and super-tiny light stimulation of individual brain cells in animals to learn about brain structures and map the connectome (the neural connections and regions, like the networks and pathways) of an organism’s brain. The term neuroplasticity, which has been around for a while, points to the capacity of brain cells to learn and adapt and basically grow and change. The field of optogenetics points to the mechanisms for neurons turning on or off through a targeted stimulus in the form of highly directed light. This is basically proof that biological matter responds dynamically to signals from the environment.

This kind of proof has been long in coming. For generations, neuroscience was largely observational: researchers could observe the electrical activity of brain regions. Identifying cause and effect within that activity has been nearly impossible. Optogenetics changed everything by fusing genetic engineering with optical technology. One example of the methodology scientists use in optogenetics is to take light-sensitive microbial proteins (originally found in single-celled algae) and insert them into specific types of neurons. By threading hair-thin fiber-optic cables into living brain tissue, researchers can flash laser light and turn precisely targeted cells on or off with millisecond precision. Optogenetics has basically transformed neuroscience from a science of correlation into a science of identifying direct causation. The potential for using this information to develop new therapies and interventions is awe-inspiring.

I was excited about the neuroscience of optogenetics, because it points to bioplasticity, a term defined as the adaptive life capacity of all body systems. Bioplasticity is the body’s capacity to heal and renew itself, or as we say in the poetic sense: bioplasticity is the “healer within,” or the the always-existing potential for the body to be well and heal itself spontaneously. Especially when supported and encouraged, the healer within, our bioplasticity, can flourish and keep us well.

Bioplasticity expands the concept of neuroplasticity, which is specific to the brain and its neurons, to include the entire human organism and all its systems. All bodily systems are connected. A living organism is an expression of finely coordinated systems, which is to say that health is an expression of balance and harmony among the systems. At any given moment, the systems express the body’s capacity to adapt and learn and respond to life. Similarly, if you think of the systems in the body as a system of highways exchanging messages and information in the form of electrical-chemical signals, the systems can also experience blocks, jams, and malfunctions when there are deficiencies and injuries in any of the systems. The body’s many systems can potentially operate in harmony throughout a lifetime, which has been called the healthspan (like lifespan)—the expression of functional balance and harmony of all the systems during a lifetime.

“We think ‘bioplasticity’ has a nice ring to it – much bigger than neuroplasticity, with the ‘bio’ bit allowing engagement of all body systems, recognising that it’s not just the brain and neurons which can change.” – David Butler, pain scientist at the Noigroup

Bioplasticity is what gives hope that the body can heal itself when the systems are fully coordinated and supported to do so. What is needed for this coordination to happen is the right combination of factors that can translate to behaviors, like good sleep, exercise and nutrition, and good relationships—these are the big four. In addition to the big four, the right attitudes, interventions and therapies can also play a role in supporting the body’s bioplasticity. The. neuroscience that includes optogenetics shows that some of these factors come from the environment (the stimuli) the cells and neurons live in, which can be either organic (for example, axons in the peripheral nervous system have the ability to repair themselves after damage when debris and waste are cleared and nutrients are available in the form of growth factor; see this article for details on the science), or the stimuli can come from a potential therapy or intervention based on optogenetic means. Alongside the exciting science and health-promoting behaviors, we also know that the mind affects the body in the form of thoughts (cognition), states of being (deep relaxation versus agitation), choices, attitudes, beliefs and priorities. All of these contribute to the whole of our human experience.

The bioplasticity concept challenges us to understand that the mind is fundamentally tied to bodily physiology, where it has its being and expression. We live and experience life as mind and body together, because mind and body are constantly influencing one another. Always. You tap into this relationship anytime you have a thought or experience an emotion or have a reaction. When you feel the gritty and real moments of life, all your bodily cells are experiencing those moments and being affected by them. A thought or an action is a real physical experience that can impact the world or your life and being in some way.

The Grittiness of Extraordinary Moments

I can just imagine the phone call to recipients of this Nobel Prize in Medicine last week. The Nobel committee is in Stockholm, and one of the scientists winning the award lives in the United States. Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford scientist living in California with his wife and five children, described the phone call he received before the award was made later that morning. Sometimes, the recipients do not answer the phone call from Stockholm, of course. Other times, late in the night, the recipient getting the call, like Deisseroth, fumbles for the phone and hurries to answers it, maybe expecting bad news? I imagine he answered with his heart was pounding, and he struggled to wake up and make sense of things. Being on the receiving end of a late-night phone call is a common human experience that can be life-changing in the best and worst ways alike. In interviews later, Deisseroth said he was disoriented getting the call having drifted off to sleep after a long work day. The excitement in the middle of the night meant he likely did not sleep much during the night! The stress of the long day ahead, and still needing to make lunch for the kids before school that morning, while the news spread and colleagues and friends sent texts, emails or called him to congratulate him made the day especially full. This was not an ordinary day. Life events like this are disorienting. We know extraordinary days can happen for myriad reasons, positive and negative. It takes time to adjust and come to terms with all that is happening.

Living is stressful. It’s a fitting irony that even winning a Nobel prize is stressful and strange. At least one of very researchers who spent decades learning how to illuminate neural circuits with precise flashes of light had a direct experience of their own biology completely hijacked (complete with stress hormones of joy, elation, stress and confusion) getting that phone call in the middle of the night.

Even good news can be stressful and hard to accept.

But just breathing and being present are enough to get through the day. The body’s systems can regulate themselves with time and attention. It is worth it to do this on a daily and repeated basis. Self-regulation can start with a simple decision to work with what is in the environment, breathe, go with the flow, and see what comes next. A regular meditation practice, a mindfulness practice like Tai Chi, meditation or Yoga, supports the body’s natural bioplasticity, which in turn develops long-term psychological resilience and the capacity to manage stress and grow and develop from it. Just remember that it sometimes takes time and adjustment (a lot of deep breathing and repeated practice to return to center) to support this. Only then does the sum total of the hard work, the long hours, the uncertainties, the hard feelings that the past was a waste or a terrible heartbreak begin to make sense. Can the hard knocks reveal themselves to be worth it? Worth it for how they help us learn and grow and find our way to being okay.

It reminds me of the time my sister and I got hit by a car walking home from school one day when we were kids. I got the wind knocked out of me for a moment when I fell and skinned my knees pretty badly, but the car that hit us both with great force also threw my sister back against a curb we had just stepped off of. When I got up off the ground and came around to check on her: she was unconscious from a blow to the head when her head hit the pavement where she fell, and her left leg was broken at the femur. A thin stream of blood oozed out of the top of her head and onto the street. Gritty! Horrified, I ran to get help; thankfully, dad’s work was nearby. I rode in the ambulance that took her to the hospital that day. The hard journey of recovery began in that moment. She was out of school for months and feared she would be held back a year. To avoid that scenario, she applied herself. She taught herself to paint during the many hours alone in the hospital. She read. She studied hard. The skills she acquired led to her to become an accomplished artist, a painter, as an adult (see her work here). She still paints and makes art and also teaches fine arts. Her paintings and mixed media pieces are part of a permanent collection at a professional art gallery in Los Angeles. Many years later, it all makes sense. Somehow the heartbreak was worth it to teach us about what it means to return to life after a horrible ordeal. But during that intense recovery time, when the heartbreak was fresh and seemed intensely endless, we all hated the suffering. The grittiness became a defining moment that taught the whole family about what what healing requires.

Living through that fateful car accident taught me a lot: the grittiness of life can fuel you to take charge of your life and commit to healing and righting the wrongs. Healing — what can be called the awakening of the healer within or the activation of our natural bioplasticity — can be supported by life when we take the the time and space to rest and reflect and pay close attention to the things (the people, the environments, the activities) that help us recover and find meaning in our suffering. When we actively decide to seek these things out, we can return to life, sometimes with new skills and abilities and wisdom.

I am not sure the scientists who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine have a mindbody practice to help them manage stress or not. Considering their many years working on optogenetics to show that biology can be shaped and controlled with light from the outside, what I am sure about is that mindbody practices help us cultivate a capacity to guide our own neural architecture from the inside. The conscious decisions and the conscious breaths we take at any given moment create the body we live in and shape the very future of our lives.